is author of a dozen books (click on covers at right), including the new "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill." He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch

13 comments:

I do not wish to minimize yesterday's tragic event, nor those at Va Tech, Columbine, etc.

Point #1 - Statistics PROVE that gun control does not work... i.e. when guns are controlled, criminals still have them and citizens do not for protection's sake. Criminals can ALWAYS get guns!

Point #2 - As the cartoon attempts to point out, the 2nd Amendment's "right to bear arms" is meant to protect the nation and its citizens from tyrants as well as from a tyrannical government. When the government takes guns away from citizens, they have no means to arm themselves and rise up against possible tyranny. The laying waste to America that is being perpetrated against the People by our train wreck of a government under the so-called "leadership" of the Democrats AND the Republicans may some day require that citizens once again rise up! Sadly, violence may be the only way that the People can get THEIR United States back and survive the Government's incompetence and indifference over the destruction that we are all too frequently witness to.

What is not debatable is that the presence of so many guns in the US makes the tragedies of mass shootings inevitable. Claims that everyone carrying would prevent these things from happening are simple wishful thinking to avoid moral responsibility

While IEHO the arguments made by the gun lovers are a load of self justifying crap, the plain fact is that none of the people making those arguments will own up to the consequences. They are moral scum for not doing so. Make no mistake about it, the death of those children, the shooting of Congressman Giffords, the many people killed by firearms in the US are a result of our policy on gun ownership, and an honest debate about gun ownership starts with acknowledging the consequences.

One can only hope that John Roberts, Anthony Kennedy, Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia go to bed to night feeling a bit guilty and worrying about the safety of their grandchildren.

Matt, you haven't addressed the point of the cartoon. You suggest that the second amendment is a useful stopgap against government tyranny. Fine, give me some examples from our history when this has been shown to be true. I am also unclear why you feel that a government imposed by violence would be more democratic than one chosen through open elections.

I don't know what indignities you believe you have suffered but are they really worse than fighting in the streets?

When the government takes guns away from citizens, they have no means to arm themselves and rise up against possible tyranny.

The world is full of countries other than the US, and we can learn certain things from them. One thing we can't help but notice is that there are many countries that have a well-armed citizenry and a brutally tyrannical government, as well as others in which private gun ownership is neither common nor rare, but manage to have peaceful, non-repressive democratic governments.

That doesn't mean we should enact major gun control measures--there are other reasons to suspect it might not work here--but it's certainly sufficient to demonstrate that the "defense against tyranny" argument is an extremely silly one in the context of the modern world. The collection of free countries in the world today show that gun ownership isn't necessary to prevent tyranny, and the unfree countries show us it's woefully insufficient.

I don't get the argument this has prevented government tyrrany either. The government has even more guns, tear gas, drone planes, and nukes. A semiautomatic weapon won't help a rebel much against the US armed forces.

It will, however, let an unstable person who wants to get on the news kill a lot of unarmed civilians.

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is author of a dozen books (click on covers at right), including the new "THE TUNNELS: Escapes Under the Berlin Wall and the Historic Films the JFK White House Tried to Kill." He was the longtime editor of Editor & Publisher. Email: epic1934@aol.com. Twitter: @GregMitch